


Watching

by a_big_apple



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Drabble, F/M, One-Sided Relationship, Pining, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-25
Updated: 2011-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-05 01:45:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_big_apple/pseuds/a_big_apple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kagome and Souta are watching their favorite TV program, and someone else is watching them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watching

**Author's Note:**

  * For [enemytosleep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/enemytosleep/gifts).



> Written for enemytosleep's birthday in 2011! :D

If the dates Kagome gave him hundreds of years ago were accurate, and they seem to have been so far, then soon he’ll have to end these visits. 

Soon, there won’t _be_ anyone to visit. Kagome will leap into the well, back into the world of five hundred years ago, and never return to this time.

He already lived that part of the story—for him it’s long gone, and he comes to this shrine in Tokyo day after day, night after night, wishing he’d lived that long-ago part a little better. More fully. Still, the threat of changing even the sparse time he had with Kagome back then keeps him guarded, _youki_ hidden, unknown to the girl who sits now on the couch with her brother, watching television.

She looks more and more as she did when he knew her as “sister-in-law,” and that pains him.

He’s grown used to the wistfulness about her, the sense that she’s not quite as…bright, here in this time. Sometimes she gazes long hours into the dark stillness of the well; sometimes she sits beneath the _Goshinboku_ and stares into space, or stretches up on her toes to touch the place where Kikyo’s arrow lodged. 

Sesshoumaru just watches, out of sight, trying to remember the few scant times he saw his half-brother during Kagome’s long absence, with that same wistful air. Perhaps it was better that he didn’t know her enough to notice she was gone, that time, but he’s never really been sure of that.

Tonight, Kagome and Souta are watching one of their favorite programs, some nonsense Sesshoumaru has never understood, involving high school boys, and a girl who dresses as one, and some sort of ridiculous club. _If humans had any sense of smell at all,_ he thinks, _they would never mistake genders in such a way._ Still, Kagome and Souta enjoy it, and Sesshoumaru enjoys watching them.

They have seen this episode before; it references the _yakuza_ , painting them much more broadly than Sesshoumaru’s experience has taught him, but perhaps that is the appeal. He finds he can’t fault it when Souta chants along with a line he knows—“Young Lord, ya gonna rumble?!”—and Kagome chuckles, for a moment free of care, her eyes lighting the way Sesshoumaru remembers them. Together the siblings repeat lines and point out details and fall over each other with laughter; Sesshoumaru allows himself a few moments of longing, first for Kagome, and then for his own little brother, before he takes a deep breath to soothe those feelings away. 

He has other business to attend to, and tonight is not the last night he will watch her, not yet. A sniff of the wind carries the kitsune’s scent from down the steep shrine stairs, here to meet him; Sesshoumaru memorizes Kagome’s bright expression, that grin that shows her teeth, and turns away.


End file.
